Pianiga

Pianiga lies inside the Roman grid, and it shows: the centuriation has left marks still perfectly visible in the countryside, and the name itself is thought to come from that of a landowner, a Pellius or an Oppilius. All through the Middle Ages the village was land of monasteries — the abbey of Sant'Ilario, San Cipriano of Murano, three Paduan monasteries — and politically it belonged to the comune of Padua; it followed Padua's fate in 1405, when it passed to Venice, which placed it in the vicariate of Mirano. Only in 1853 was the comune moved from the province of Padua to that of Venice, and the curious thing is that the Church did not follow: the four historic parishes are still today in the diocese of Padua.

In 1848 the Venetian revolution reached here too. On 23 March a notice signed by the «citizen drafter» Vincenzo Pinton announced the birth of the civic guard and the enthusiasm of the village, and asked the provisional government to make up its mind quickly with a phrase that is worth the whole document: «the Government must govern». Then the first war of independence went as it went, and the Austrians took everything back. Much closer to us, on 8 July 2015, a tornado crossed this territory together with those of Dolo and Mira: it ran a little over eleven kilometres with a front from five hundred metres to a kilometre wide, and left behind it one dead, 72 injured and several hundred people homeless.